Notes

In Shakespeare's day, swear words were generally associated with religion. You would get words like ''sblood', short for 'God's blood', taking the Lord's name in vain, and so on. That was one of the interesting things that I learned from a drama teacher in high school. Words like that in those days would have had the power to shock because people were more religious in those days. People took blasphemy seriously. I was in high school in the 1980s. In those days, we thought of swear words as being mainly associated with bodily functions. They were the sort of things that would evoke disgust and they would upset our parents terribly if they heard us say them. We, of course, would say them between ourselves with joyful abandon. I am sure that many of us took a perverse pleasure in saying words that had the power to shock at least some people. Of course, now we're all grown up and those words have achieved much more currency. People will swear th

I like to use language in a correct way. So I happened to Google accidentally quite a long time ago now that if you use 'like' with a phrase that includes a verb, it is wrong. 'Like' is a preposition, and 'as' is a conjunction. Hence, you use 'like' with a noun or a noun phrase, whereas you use 'as' with a clause that includes a verb. So you can say something like, 'you look like a monkey', or 'you look as if you swing through trees', but never 'you look like you swing through trees'. Sounds all very well, but I don't know of any English writer who actually uses this rule. Everywhere I read 'like' used as a conjunction. In fact, when I Google the exact phrase 'looks as if', all I get are pages that talk about how to use 'like' versus 'as if'. This seems to defeat the purpose of using the phrase. In the end, grammarians do not determine the rules of language, speakers do. And if they